Critical Thinking

Image credit: New York Times

An opinion piece 'The Worst Place in the World to Drill for Oil Is Up for Auction' in The New York Times this week struck me as perfect material to help kids develop critical thinking in the classroom. Congo is one of the poorest countries in the world. Its peatlands mitigate against global warming by storing vast amounts of carbon. Drilling for oil in these areas will result in an environmental catastrophe. However, auctioning land to oil majors can raise badly needed revenue to finance programs to reduce poverty and generate economic growth. What it comes down to is this - who is paying Congo to forgo their oil reserves to protect everyone else?

One of my colleagues at Doyobi pointed out the problem with schools using current affairs as material to develop critical thinking. Schools try to "simplify" things by narrowing down such issues to just a few key subjects, but the reality is that the world is very interconnected and issues do not fit perfectly into just a few boxes. So even if some well-intentioned teachers do bring up deforestation in the Congo rainforest, they would only highlight issues related to (1) geography (2) biological diversity and (3) climate change, ignoring other issues like resource scarcity, government revenue, poverty and economic growth.

This gives kids an overly simplistic interpretation of the world, without recognising that the human element - politics, capitalism, competition for resources - plays a huge part.

Parenting For Brain defines critical thinking as a set of skills and habits of mind, including the ability to:

• define a problem

• identify assumptions

• analyse ideas

• reason critically

• systematically list different possible causes

• create plausible solutions

• evaluate correctness of plausible solutions using logical reasoning

• make creative connections between ideas from different disciplines

Here's a simple exercise we use at Doyobi to get kids to question whether a piece of news is real or fake.

In a previous issue of Education & Catastrophe 'Education In A VUCA World', I wrote about the need for kids to be skilled in critical thinking, communicating and collaborative problem-solving.

At Doyobi, we believe the most effective way for kids to learn critical thinking is to put them in situations where they have to navigate uncertainty and make decisions. Sometimes they make the right call. Other times they don't. It does not matter if they got it wrong. Through individual and group reflection, they work through the decision-making process to try to figure out what they got right and what they didn't get right. Doyobi's Learning Experience Designers use the following framework to design activities and challenges that get kids to practise critical thinking.

Critical thinking is a foundational skill every child needs to develop. Elon Musk calls it First Principles Thinking and uses it as his mental model to work through hard problems and make tough calls. As Dana Mortenson pointed out, the ability to live in ambiguity, uncertainty and change and figure out how to navigate that is antithetical to how school was set up where there’s a right answer and a wrong answer.

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Till the next issue!